Whether on skis or a snowboard, every rider wants to be able to carve a turn as they traverse down the ski slope. Carving a turn amounts to putting the skis or snowboard on edge and then shooting through a smooth arc. World cup skiers carve their turns as they thread the gates on a slope. Advanced snowboarders carve turns as they lean deep into the mountain and drive the edge of their boards hard into the slope. Most skiers and snowboarders, however, do not carve their turns, but rather skid their ski or snowboard tails through a scraping turn.
The design of a conventional snowboard only serves to amplify the difficulty experienced by the average snowboarding while attempting to carve a turn. Based on the fact that the bindings are spaced far apart on a conventional board to enable the rider to maintain a preferred stance that facilitates balance and maneuverability, and that the size of the bindings are very small relative to the board, the load applied by the rider during a turn tends to be a point load applied through the foot/bindings and tends to only support a relative small area of the board adjacent the boot bindings. With the reaction forces being upwardly directed, the board tends to bend around the foot/bindings. Because the middle section is generally unsupported by the applied load, it tends to bend in a direction opposite to the bend of the ends of the board. As a result, the conventional snowboard is prone to flat spots and negative flex regions, which diminish the snowboard's ability to hold an edge through a carving turn.
One way manufactures of conventional snowboards have been able to achieve more uniform reaction forces along the entirety of the edge of the board and combat the problem of flat spots and negative flex regions is to make an overall stiffer board, i.e., a carving board. To master the art of turn carving with a conventional snowboard, the rider must drive the snowboard into the slope hard enough to cause it to bend in a manner that causes it to form a turn carving arc. It follows then that the stiffer the snowboard, the more difficult it will be to maneuver for overall snowboarding and, as a result, the stiffer board is less desirable for over all snowboarding.
Although a more flexible snowboard will be easier to maneuver, it will also be less stable. Because a snowboard generally has a wide body, the ends of the snowboard will naturally tend to twist as the snowboard bends as the edge of the snowboard is driven into the mountain to make a turn. Thus, as the snowboard becomes more flexible, it tends to more readily twist and negatively bend between the bindings.
Most snowboard manufacturers appear to be using similar approaches to address these problems. With the end goal being uniform flex and reaction forces along the edge and body of the snowboard, which leads to more predictable and controllable performance and greater stability, the manufactures are going to great lengths to distribute the point loads applied to the board by the rider to greater areas along the edge of the board. Some of the approaches used by these manufactures include varying the thickness of the board or utilizing a variety of different stiffening methods, e.g., torsion forks and ribs within the board, in combination with different orientations and different materials throughout the board. The most popular board design appears to include making the segments of the board where the boot bindings are mounted thicker than the middle and end segments of the board. The thickened boot/binding segments of the board tend to distribute more of the load from the rider over a greater portion of the edge of the board. However, given the standard mounting method for boot bindings on the typical snowboard, it is very difficult to distribute the rider's load uniformly to a great enough area on the board to get uniform flex without making a very stiff board or a board having extreme variations in the thickness and stiffness across the board's laminate construction. In addition to being quite costly to manufacture, such laminate construction would likely have difficulty surviving the thrashing a snowboard experiences without the occurrence of innerlaminer sheer, which would likely result in board failure.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a snowboard that facilitates uniform flex and reaction forces along the edge and body of the snowboard, that performs more predictably and controllably, that facilitates turn carving without reducing the snowboard's stability, that provides better edge hold through a turn, and that has a softer more forgiving overall feel but is able to maintain consistent edge hold when the board is pushed aggressively at higher speeds when reaction forces become greater.